Lady Mary Wroth watched Shakespeare act in his own plays, heard her relative Sir Walter Raleigh talk about founding Virginia, and almost certainly met Pocahantas and ambassadors from Morocco. Wroth’s later prose fiction echoes elements of her own life, including foreign travel, tragic deaths of siblings, arranged marriage, a lifelong love for her cousin, royal visits to her home, and then civil war.

This blog post spotlights five female artists whose interpretations of Shakespeare’s works are part of the Folger collection. We decided to highlight three sculptors and two book artists. Several of these artists and their work have been featured on The Collation, a Folger blog about research, scholarship, and the Folger collection.

Fake quotes have been in the news lately, from the Republican National Committee’s Abraham Lincoln flub to the bogus Winston Churchill quote about supporting funding for the arts during World War II. Such misattribution is familiar to Shakespeare enthusiasts. Every day, fake Shakespeare quotes are being shared on social media. Have you come across these ones?

Shakespeare is a familiar sight in the theater and on the movie screen, but he’s permeated many other areas of American life. Advertisers have picked up on the ubiquity of Shakespeare for more than two centuries.

Since their revival by David Garrick in the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare and his plays have always generated a certain aura of celebrity, sometimes referred to as “Bardolatry.” Following in the footsteps of Garrick, stage actors regularly rose to stardom on the strength of their Shakespearean performances, and would continue to play their “signature” roles… Continue Reading »